The naive illusion to believe, that creative thinking, can some-how save us.

The naive illusion to believe, that creative thinking, can some-how save us.

(Based on a comment Morris Berman did about a conference David Levy made in the Google Corporation.) NO TIME TO THINK.

http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=KHGcvj3JiGA

http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/

I have never believed in the modern concept of quality time, or tune of the body with universal balance. Think quality thoughts in good times and spaces, inevitably has relation with efficiency and a way to compensate acceleration processes, by reducing existential needs (real) in function of having access to a wide range of individual alternatives (ideals). It’s a simultaneous process, where the body is programed for the purpose of visualized chances that can or can not take place, but appear as posible. The best mind in this setting is that opened but focused, capable of precise combinations for a certain place and moment, event that and can even posicion itself in time and become what is called a clasic, eternal and inmortal, that doesn`t live and die like real and precarious life.

This way nothing is really revealed from life, because we are not deeply connected with matter, earth or mortality, but linked to a mind paradigm that represents a whole (earth), not being it. It’s like the map is not the territory, something we long ago forgot to difference. The phenomena is frozen to be mobilized as a noumenon. The world upside down, inverted.

Sublimating cruelty only makes the system sustainable in time, science and technology in this way, has not just developed efficient functions, but also has given them suggestive forms. And wisdom (an elegant way to say cunning) is the ability to give these mediums the power to become the message. What Kant called “the sense of achievement”. This way survival doesn’t depend if “wisdom” can or can not provide deep targeted thinking, because creative thought gives sense to repetitive thought and routine. Leisure in these terms can reveal creative thought, but if it’s purpose is tune the mind into making more creative solutions to things… the bottom line still has to do with efficiency.

In the demands of work, people need leisure. In Spanish “neg-ocio” means business, but also means deny leisure. Is work dignifying or brutalization?

The reason that creative thinking is seen today, as a luxury or extravagance, is just a contextual problem. The great majorities just function mechanically, luckily have certain abilities to anticipate response or simply react in more strategic ways. Philosophy today is a sublime curiosity, but conventional history says a way of life in ancient Greek, that incidentally created the western world. Let’s not dream of ideal revivals that can somehow be massively spread. Ideas have always been administrated by few and applied to the many, speculative revolutions in history have just been fire-works. Illustration for equality is a fantasy that sophisticates slaves and raises the standards of the modern mind prison. Do we work to learn and have freedom for calm? We must know affluent middle class who become yoga searchers of evolution do not live in favelas, where 20 people live in 25 m2.

You can say only who is still can hear and have receptive understanding, but on the other hand has a hierarchical position that disables. The domes of power also have there controlling mechanisms, paradigms of the elite maybe were shaped once by the liberal arts of the scholastic? Eccentric nobles are species in extinction today. Empathy is a sensible mind strategy, it doesn’t reveal life, but instead supreme ways of organization that have even been called beautifull. In other words for me, discursive and creative thought are two faces of the same coin. The most survive with discursive thought and the few represent sophisticated models, create hopes and sustain this, with creative thought.

If you produce more goods and services than what people need, you just have to produce more needs. Advertising means not only the creation of new mediums but also new messages that complicate reality with Morin’s complexity, that opens individual chances and closes collective communication with its inherent constraints. In these terms, is Babel a self fulfilled prophecy?

Create needs, structure the perception of needs, mind control that confuses the concepts: live or survive. How much more can we take as individuals?, How faster can this go without collapse? Thomas Eriksson said: When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins, the important is never done, there is always something urgent to do first. Survive mantaining speculative positions is not living when reality emerges. And here are two positions of thinking in two worlds:

• subconcious as revealing unconcious (something like Magic realism), being there submerged in reality, witness subtle miracles and feel alive.

• concious looking for supraconcious (something like Formal rationalism), moving for a position and finding with any method, living an eternal exodus to survive.

Something appears before being able to be put into words is different than random speculation with words, music notes or numbers making something appear, induced by a structure or parent (from the part to the total) to deduct the entire posible to see according to ones “intelegence” or tune with the order. This is more posible if mind chatter doesn’t disturb mind cycles, mind tunes without rushing, focuses and sees something new and atractive. But, is this new? , or has something to do with what St. Augustine says: “Do I find because I searched, or do I search because I already found.” That notion of a peacefull future, may be this unconciously tend to stability found in this supraconcious, for me an illusion, an anticipation of the real unconscious that: Saves us or convicts us to never relate to reality?, hope in Pandora’s box, thinking we move around evil but with hope at the bottom, trapped in a apparently infinity cosmos without chaos.

It’s not about filtering, organizing and understanding media saturation or the overload of information to be able to prosecute with more creativity and mind diet. Do activities in more contemplative ways, always falls back into efficiency, of how we learn to react and operate in the paradigm and the distracting qualities of the inbox. Research and know ourselves, but in relation to the paradigm. Self centered exercises finally.

Applications of science have built man a house or a prison? Does a mind organizer really have a good purpose? Numbers, music and words anticipate and move life, smartest with numbers or music are not smarter, but just tuned with them. What is creative work or good work? Is it about efficiency and universal understanding, that control revolution, rise of the corporation and rise of advertising?

We live in a Culture Fixated on certain toys that kill silence, toys that also decrease productivity with distraction. Certain specific instruments are massively used, because an attractive “form” doesn’t necesarrilly implicate an efficient functioning. People apparently work because the goal is indistinguishable from the way to do things. I do not mean rudimentary (old) ways but on the contrary sophisticated (new) ways, noisy and squandering, expansion and innovation. Purge this only makes the remedies worse than the disease. Is that creative thinking?

I agree technology is not neutral. As you say, Herbert Marcuse to Marshall McLuhan have shown, tech is very far from neutral; it changes the environment in which we operate, until the medium becomes the message. We are explained at school that technology just gave humanity more time and comfort, as if nothing else affects use with it. But along with it comes sophistication, lack of naturalness, refinement, where the mechanisms are more complex, advanced and advancing ... towards where? A paradigm, the representation of the world, the map without territory, and places are subjected to a role with it, the meaning of their progress, teleological convergence of everybody under the same god and nation. As you say modern tech is "purposive-rational"; it shatters the context.

It’s an unconscious operation, when we use the mediums we try to reach the message and control it somehow, changing it’s form but mantaining it’s position and internal structure, as if we moved toward a mutant horizon that makes us react but still advance toward it. It’s like what you state in The Reenchaintment of the World, that Bacon with his emprical method tried to demonstrate that Descartes ideas were wrong; but the paradox was, the methods just strengthened the ideas, by maintaining it’s mutable form visible, but invisible structure constant, it just transforms in happy novelty, preventing us see the real decay.

Eugenio Trias calls this the infinity in baroque. An infinite mind space of creation (numbers, music and geometry) that does not have much to do with empty or mystery really embodied. The tendency to “perfection” just reduces human nature or worse creates a virtual and sophisticated pseudo human parallel that works with individual and collective beliefs. I also believe the empire we so greatly desire is the destruction we ultimately obtain. That’s why a virtual "contemplative space" is just an absurd technological fix, that will drag this whole illusion on. I believe a real awakening to reality would lead us from this illusive beauty to a sinister reality. Where positive rationalism and historical materialism are just action-reaction of the same fiction. As you say what you really would get is not a transformed cesspool (efficient and light mind to finish), but rather a dirty lotus (real and massive body to start).

Tv, cell phones and lab tops get into homes like multinationals get into countries. Mediums that physically alter the brain so as to adapt it to hyper-busyness, multitasking, and the new technologies. Digital technology is actually rewiring the brain. Human identity has not changed in the last 100,000 years, since the physical brain has not changed in that time period. Is evolution then just an illusion? I believe like Ortega and Gasset that the fear of vacuum was transformed into the illusion of infinity, which makes us no longer want to be here, but there.

(Question left for Mr. Berman)

Dear Mr Berman:

I agree and think a virtual "contemplative space" is just a technological fix, that will drag this whole illusion on. But:

What makes us want our own destruction?
What makes us see a transformed cesspool rather than a dirty lotus?

I believe like Ortega and Gasset that the fear of vacuum was transformed into the illusion of infinity, which makes us no longer want to be here, but there. I also believe the tendency to “perfection” just reduces human nature or worse creates a virtual and sophisticated pseudo human parallel that works with both individual and collective beliefs.

I feel the known world, is like if we all moved toward a mutant horizon that makes us react but still advance toward it.

I’d love to know what you think about this paradox?